RationalWiki trustees’ David Gerard and psychology professor Trent Toulouse appear to be quite an ambitious confederacy. Both Wikipedia editors, active within the community – maintain RationalWiki as a platform to battle internet cranks, right-wing and conservative politics, and claim to analyze the “anti-science” movement. As if.

Unfortunately, most of the videos of Mannion faking the seance, which appeared in June 2016, are no longer available. The only surviving video is this, as far as I'm aware. As Jon Donnis wrote,"Removing his shirt and swinging it around to create a breeze of body odour!"

This 52 min interview was broadcast on 15 August 2018, the interviewer introduces Gary as "a great friend of Victor and Wendy Zammit", who apparently have been "singing his praises" and think he is "terrific".

Gary Mannion is a young Australian who is a skilled psychic surgeon and a developing physical medium. He shares with us fascinating details about his rare and rapidly-developing gifts.

"a great friend of Victor and Wendy Zammit", who apparently have been "singing his praises" and think he is "terrific".

As you probably know, Victor "Dammit" Zammit is one of the craziest of all the prominent loonies in the world.

He claims to have been a high court judge with degrees in any subject that he ever mentions. He has a $1m challenge, to disprove every word of one of his books to his satisfaction; and thinks that this is somehow equivalent to the old Randi challenge.

He used to be obsessed with James Randi. Constantly denouncing him IN CAPITALS and with lots of exclamation marks!!!!!!!! his main arguments seem to have been that Randi's name sounds funny (irony is dead), that Randi has admitted to being a magician, and lots of SHOUTING vaguely about something that was presumably homophobia but it was actually difficult to be sure.

A prominent recent example of how a
fraudulent medium was unmasked concerns Gary Mannion. He was long
surrounded by suspicions—especially after a former circle leader and very
close friend of his, Michael Mayo, noted several times in dim light that
Mannion impersonated the “spirits” himself. At a later séance in November
2014, Mayo secretly examined the chair to which Mannion was bound when
sitters at the other end of the room claimed they were touched by a “spirit”
in the dark—and indeed the chair on which the entranced Mannion was
supposed to rest motionless was empty (Anonymous 2016a, Anonymous
2016b). As a result of even more suspicions (Whitham 2016), Mannion
was secretly fi lmed with an infrared camera during a séance on May 1,
2016. This very instructive and recommendable documentation of what
really happens during séances with Mannion is available on the Internet
(Anonymous no date).
In general, it appears to be easy to dupe guest sitters who fasten the ties
around the arms of mediums. Often, they never secured mediums before,
and they are not trained to examine the critical details in September this year.